Philosophical reflections on perfume and perfumery:
An exploration of aesthetic, epistemological, metaphysical, moral, ontological, and phenomenological issues.
Relevant comments are most welcome—whether you agree or disagree!

Thursday, June 27, 2013

Summertime presents a propitious
opportunity to reflect upon the nature of perfume. Why? Because it's
damned hot outside—at least here in Boston—and a good cologne can
vastly improve one's oppressive and muggy and sweaty and otherwise
unpleasant afternoon. How does cologne work its mood-elevating magic?

First off, it smells good. From bright
citrus to clean musk to grassy green to violet leaf and lightly
spiced tea, colognes manage to cover the gamut of scents found in the
larger olfactory sphere spanning all perfumes, but the lower
percentage of key ingredients makes cologne perfect for the summer
months.

Yes, cologne cools and refreshes the
body, particularly when applied as a splash, which is possible
because of the lower concentrations of scent-making ingredients. More
of the liquid which hits the skin is alcohol and water, proving yet
again that hydration is good. With a few spritzes or a gentle splash,
the spirit is immediately renewed as the air spinning off that
ceiling fan suddenly seems twenty degrees cooler than it did. The
action of the fan and the cologne are collaborating in a small piece
of deceit: neither changes the temperature of the ambient air in the
room, but together they fool the body into feeling much cooler than
it was before.

My favorite colognes are those
featuring a large percentage—preferably 100%—of natural
ingredients. That's because in extreme weather conditions newfangled
chemical soups sometimes morph in unexpected ways, just as I imagine
perfumes do more generally when exposed to heat and light. Because
the temperature is elevated even while the cologne is worn, I have
found that the more natural it is, the better it tends to hold
together and consistently smell nice. Cologne used in this way is
obviously functional fragrance. Is it anything else? To be honest, my unedited response to
this question is: Who cares? Is not fulfilling one important
function enough to justify the existence of cologne? Why must it also
be something else? Who says that it must be, and why?

I began thinking about this question
recently while soaking in a scented tub and listening to one of
Beethoven's string quartets. It suddenly dawned on me how much more
complex and interesting even a single passage from a work of
classical music is than even the most complicated of perfumes. Sure
some of them (albeit fewer and fewer these days...) unfurl in
interesting ways, transforming from one to another scent over the
course of a wear.

In the most dynamic of cases, the
perfume may undulate as its component scents wax and wane, leading
one's nose to take note of different features of the composition at
different moments in time and permitting a form of olfactory
reflection and refraction to take place. But even in those rare cases
of the most complex of perfumes, probably the closest comparison to
complexity in music would be something along the lines of a
four-chord pop song.

Perfume simply cannot, even in
principle, scale the heights achieved by music, first, because it is
so much simpler and, second, because our perception of it is so very
subjective. I admit that I am pianist, trained in classical
repertoire, and so my apparent disparagement or belittling of perfume
may seem unfair to someone who, instead, has spent his life creating
new combinations of scents. There may be some truth to that
criticism, but I still believe that a finished perfume is
considerably less interesting than any sonata or ballade, or prélude
or mazurka or étude—or even two-part invention by J.S. Bach. I
truly believe that even the profoundest of perfumes is nowhere near
as interesting as even the simplest piece of music which I've ever
played or heard.

Perfume is there to be
enjoyed, a number of scents combined together in a small volume of
space and usually not found together in exactly that way in nature. (Exceptions to the rule include realistic soliflores.) If masterfully
composed, the combination of these scents will play out over time,
but there is nothing even approaching tonal counterpoint to be found
in a bottle of perfume. Even worse, owing to a variety of features
peculiar to perfume perception in human beings, we cannot even seem
to agree what we are talking about!

In approaching music, we have something
to point to. There are key signatures and tempos and voices and
refrains and codas. These are all written right there into the score,
so no one can deny their presence. We can have a conversation about
all of those aspects of music in the way in which we cannot so much
when it comes to perfume because people do not even agree about what
they smell, and its significance appears clearly to be determined by
their idiosyncratic past history, values, and beliefs.

Judging by the reviews I've seen online, many people are affected by the note pyramids offered up by the
house, even though it seems obvious that they are often a part of
marketing the perfume and may or may not have any objective validity.
My distinct impression is that many reviewers feel that they must
perceive the official notes, and this may lead them to offer a
narrative about the perfume which features those notes, even in those
cases—such as highly abstract designer fragrances—where nothing
even approaching the essences of the named flowers is present. What
is in the bottle does matter, but it is mediated through an
amalgamation of entirely subjective associations—and market-induced
expectations. People are influenced to different degrees by
marketing, and since no one else has lived our own life or walked in
our shoes, no one else will perceive a perfume in exactly the same
way that we do. Yes, you can tell a story about a perfume, but 99% of it derives from inside your head.

One might retort that the same can be
said about music, which is just as subjectively processed, and it is
true that people have different tastes in music and different levels
of sophistication when it comes to understanding music theoretically.
But two people who have been trained classically—say, two
pianists—can talk about the objective features of a sonata written
into the score. In stark contrast, two equally knowledgeable
perfumistas may or may not agree about what they smell or whether it
is any good.

While sitting in my tub listening to
beautiful music and enjoying a pleasant scent wafting off the water,
it occurred to me that the value of perfume has absolutely nothing to
do with whether it will ever be exalted as one of the beaux arts
by Western culture. It simply does not matter, at the end of the day,
because the only reason why I really care about perfume is
because I use it. My enjoyment of perfume is not different in
kind from my enjoyment of the scent wafting off the bath water, even
though the two scents may have been produced in entirely different
ways.

Let me repeat the above confession: I
use perfume, and I
value it only insofar as it serves my purposes. It has no
importance beyond its capacity to serve my purposes, to be used by me. A perfume never spritzed may as well not exist. I use perfume to scent myself, to cool off, to derive a sense of pleasure. But
wait, there's more.

Not that we need any more, but I came up with a new argument against
the “Perfumery is art” thesis. Here's how it goes: Home
fragrance is functional. But home fragrance differs from perfume
not in kind but in degree. We occupy our home, and when we wear
perfume we may serve the same function as a scented candle to those
around us—and also to ourselves. I have many niche candles:
Diptyque, L'Artisan Parfumeur, Sage, Bond no 9, elizabethW, Etro, and
all of them smell every bit as splendid as the perfumes of those
houses which they feature.

At the other end of the home fragrance spectrum are found
Febreeze spray, Yankee candles, Wick plug-ins, and the like. If we
allow that niche candles are art, then how to exclude all of these
less noble forms of home fragrance? And if we deny that niche candles
are art, must we not deny that the fragrances which scent them are as
well? So here we have another conundrum, beyond the concerns so
incisively articulated by Bryan Ross at From Pyrgos and Christos at Memory of Scent.

While thinking about this issue again,
in the light of recent developments in perfumery, I also began to
realize that even if perfumery could be considered art in some rare
cases, it will never be recognized as such, in a general way, for the
following reasons deriving from the current state of Western
civilization:1. Reformulation. Whether
because of the IFRA restrictions (and now IFRA-inspired EU
regulations) or for more crassly economic reasons, the once-classic
perfumes have undergone vast changes in composition. The same names
are being used in most cases (one exception being Christian Dior
Miss Dior), but for the most part, the perfume bearing the
name of an icon from the twentieth century has changed enough to
make it impossible to say much about that perfume in a general way.
Yes, once upon a time it was rich and had incredible depth. Yes,
today it may seem flatter and less inspired, but people will
continue to buy it because its reputation precedes it, and people's
reception is informed by what they are told that they ought to
believe. In order for objective masterpieces of perfume art to be
exalted by posterity, they must exist in the same form as they
existed when earlier writers described them. Does the Osmothèque
solve this problem? I think not, but that's another story.2. House management. The
twenty-first-century phenomenon of corporate conglomeratization has
affected many aspects of business in all realms of consumer goods,
but the implications may be starkest of all in the case of perfume.
Why? Because the answers to all of the key questions determining the
fate of a perfume are made by managers who may or may not have any
interest in preserving the original perfume intact. Publicly traded
companies, as Coty recently became, are beholden to stockholders,
and healthy profit margins become essential if a manager is to
retain his position, as all of them obviously seek to do (unless of course
they resign).Such a manager will do what needs to be
done to see to it that the stockholders are happy with the way the
business is being run. Stockholders in Coty may or may not care
about the intrinsic quality of the products. Many people in the
world could not care less about perfume, and CEOs may in some cases
number among them. The only thing that we can really count on is
that if quality happens to translate into sales, then quality will
be regarded by managers as good. If, on the other hand, quality eats into profits,
then it must be sacrificed. If it becomes more profitable to sell many bottles at a lower price than fewer bottles at a higher price, then the formula will be cheapened. The stockholders of companies, in their
capacity as stockholders—and whatever their personal feelings
about perfume may be—want profit . Perhaps as individual consumers
they appreciate perfume, but they'll have no problem with procuring
their fine perfume elsewhere, using the funds which they reap from
whatever it is that Coty does to maximize profit in the case of its
various subsumed brands.3.Niche houses—and autodidact
perfumers—today abound and continue to proliferate. This niche perfumery industry has obviously proven to be profitable, requires
little initial outlay or even professional training, and gives the
power to create and profit from the fruits of one's labor even with
no background or history in the area. It's remarkable, actually, the
marked distinction between perfumery and the (other) arts in this
regard.No one decides as a result of a
mid-life crisis (or reasonable facsimile) that the time has arrived to
become a concert pianist, though one never took any piano lessons as
a child or adolescent. To publicly profess such a plan would probably be
taken as a sign of mental instability, even delusions of grandeur.
Accomplished pianists have spent years upon years training to
achieve even basic competency, and even more years to achieve the
skill of a master pianist. In perfumery in the past, more or less
the same situation appears to have obtained, which is probably why
so many perfumers were born into families whose business it was to
produce perfume.In the past, during the golden age of perfumery, the skill of a trained perfumer was
handed down from generation to generation, not claimed to be
acquired in a short period of time by someone who liked perfume and
decided to try to make some from an assortment of fragrance and
essential oils which he began mixing together in his
kitchen or garage. Just as a fondness for instrumental music does
not alone suffice to make one a skilled musician, is it not rather pretentious and insulting to the history of perfumery (not to
mention unrealistic) to suppose that one can simply “decide,”
with no prior education or experience in the subject, to be a perfumer, in fact, next week?But anyone has the right to
pick up a paintbrush and take a stab at landscape or portrait
painting, so why should aspiring perfumers not be able to do the
same?one may well rejoinder. People can do such things, of
course, but the lack of training and attention to detail of a
professional perfumer will likely be missing. For this reason, among
others, I believe that most of the current niche firms will cease to
exist in short order. Some of these people will decide to move on,
perhaps to obtain a realtor's license or to open up a fast-food
franchise store. With so many choices, so many established and very
fine perfumers who have dedicated their lives to perfecting their
craft, why should consumers invest their modest wallet share in the work of dilettantes? The answer is
clear...4. Hype is what appears above all to
sell perfume in the twenty-first century. New is good, everyone
seems to assume. The next big thing is always just around the bend,
and people are willing to invest large sums of money to own bottles
of the latest “it” perfume. Once they have invested, they become
more apt to defend the integrity of their acquisition, so as not to
feel like a dupe.Given the current state of the industry, it seems safe to say that the
golden age of perfumery is behind us. Why? Because most perfumes
produced today are simple, linear, and abstract. They are
essentially mixtures of a few components to produce a “pleasant”
scent. Perfume making in the age of the multilaunchers, who put out
several or even dozens of perfumes at a time, has become a matter of
mixing a set number of ingredients together in every conceivable
logical combination. Lego perfumery is not the exception but the rule.This, my fragrant friends, is what the business of perfumery has become, and
it is hard to see how anything might reverse the seemingly
inexorable forward-marching trajectory to greater simplicity and
more cost-effective and abstract scents. Because nearly everyone in the mainstream is doing this--and many in the niche category as well--anyone
concerned to survive in the competitive market must do the same,
and all the more because modern people's tastes are being transformed in
the process. Not so long ago, the house of Clean hit on a market-viable idea: give
all people, including those who have previously shunned perfumes, a
product which they can feel comfortable with. How could anything be
more naturally and intuitively appealing than the scent of being clean? Today abstract sweet laundry and shampoo and conditioner scents are being sold as perfumes. The process
by which this "clean agenda" is being inculcated in modern consumers is
precisely the same as the process by which Gabrielle Chanel
convinced women that they should smell like aldehydes: seduction.Market forces and consumer behavior
are mutually reinforcing. When consumers are essentially told that
good perfume is clean and simple and abstract, then that becomes
their concept of perfume. Now that the companies holding the key
formulas of the classic perfumes of the twentieth-century have
capitulated to the “modern way,” we appear to be moving more and more toward a toiletry-centric conception of perfume, which will become
less not more expensive and comprise a large number of "temporary" fragrances whose
market life can be expected to become shorter and shorter in the age of Twitter launches and flankers. Given this state of affairs, I see
no hope for the vindication of the "perfumery is art" thesis. In fact, I would go so far as to say that, as
things currently stand, the art thesis is no more and no less than a marketing
tack used by exclusive niche houses. It adds an extra appeal to some
sorts of consumers not unlike the appeal enjoyed by a perfume which
is explicitly associated with a celebrity's name. It's probably not a coincidence that the celebrity
phenomenon has infected niche perfumery as well, with “rock star”
perfumers worshiped by throngs of fawning perfumistas, when in fact most such perfumers are simply doing their job!

So there you have it, my fragrant friends, how I learned to stop worrying about art and enjoy my perfume for what it really is: functional fragrance. If we are honest with ourselves, we must own that, in our day-to-day use of perfume, the art question does not matter in the least. So long as we are able to use our perfume to serve our own purposes, then we'll continue to be
happy that it exists. Calling our favorite perfumes "works of art" adds
nothing to them whatsoever. They are what they are: collections of
scents which fill us with delight whenever we wear and smell them.

Tuesday, June 18, 2013

tautology, tautologicalI used the term tautology recently, in an exchange with my perfume pal Bryan Ross (From Pyrgos) in the comments on a recent post. He had invoked "The Law of Aspen", and I attempted to offer counterexamples, which he indicated were also covered, which led me to retort that the "law" sounded more like a tautology to me. So what is a tautology? It is a statement which is logically true. It cannot be false. Here are a couple of examples:

Perfume is perfume.

Either a liquid is perfume, or it is not perfume.

In thinking about logical form, it may be easier to substitute letters for the propositions, so that one does not get distracted by the meanings of the terms. I admit that in recent decades professional philosophers went a bit crazy with their symbol-mongering, probably because they wished that they were mathematicians, or maybe because the more they obfuscate their thoughts, the less accessible they become to general readers, who then leave the philosophers all alone in their little intellectual ghetto to talk to one another and twiddle their thumbs. Anyway, here's the symbol form of the above two statements:

P = P

P v ~P

I doubt that anyone will take issue with the first of the two statements, but one might wonder whether something could be "neither-nor". Maybe a liquid is neither perfume nor not-perfume. Most terms which we use do however work, since the two choices are mutually exclusive and exhaustive. There is no logical "sort of". The important point is just to decide what you mean by "perfume", then see whether a proposed liquid is subsumed by that definition or not. Either it is, or it is not. There are plenty of truisms, which seem in reality to be true, but it is not a matter of their logical form. It's instead a contingent matter, having to do with the way the world happens to be.

Perfume should smell good.

Perfume is to be worn.

When examples of unwearable juice are adduced, usually they are still considered to be perfume, just bad perfume, but they do seem to conflict with the truism that "Perfume is to be worn," which should perhaps be modified to read:

Good perfume is to be worn.

That sounds like a truism, but even that might be false. Some people may prefer to hoard their perfume to sell at a later date, or perhaps they don't want to squander it on less-lofty occasions, so they wear it only to special events or around certain people.

Getting back to "The Law of Aspen", the idea, as I understand it, is that a cheap-o perfume such as Aspen survives only because it smells good. My problem with that statement was that there could be other reasons why such a perfume survives, and if it is true that every perfume at the drugstore which continues to sell does so because some people think that it smells good, then the "law" starts to sound more like a tautology to me. Are there really no counterexamples? Perhaps I've misunderstood the explanatory work done by this alleged law? I recently saw a line-up of "Smells Like" knock-offs at the drugstore, and I noticed that all of the testers were empty. I smelled a couple of the nozzles and found that they did smack of the famous perfume which they were explicitly mimicking: Angel, Chanel no 5, Euphoria, and others. Then I started to think about why those perfumes continue to sell, especially in an era where online perfume discounters abound, and most mainstream perfumes can now be found for a fraction of MSRP. Does "The Law of Aspen" apply to this case? Or is the explanation for the success of the drugstore knock-offs instead simple human ignorance?

Thursday, June 13, 2013

Coffee table books are a funny genre. They may be the least read of all publications, because they serve functions quite distinct from those of other kinds of books. Coffee table books are primarily decorative in nature.

They sit in people's living rooms generally untouched along with a variety of other random objects. Often they are art related and may feature the name of their subject in bold type on the spine: Picasso, Van Gogh, Monet, Kandinsky, Warhol, Pollock, the list of immediately recognizable artists, even to people who never studied art history in school, goes on and on and on.

More sophisticated persons, who did study art history and perhaps have careers related in some way to art or design, may have stacks of coffee table books covering far more obscure subjects, featuring names unknown to the vast majority even of educated people. The books mark the owners as being a part of an elite cultural group rather far removed from the unwashed masses whose "coffee tables" serve as ottomans before televisions and are more likely to be littered with empty beer cans than covered with tastefully placed books.

With the advent of the internet, the boundaries between such groups have become far more fluid, since anyone can learn about even the most arcane of subjects simply by investing some time surfing the world wide web.

Which brings us back to the subject of coffee table books. Why? Because they may be the only surviving physical books in the decades and centuries to come. As devices become the primary source of printed books, making it possible to carry an entire library in one's briefcase or purse--or better yet simply access someone else's collection as needed--coffee table books may still persist, sitting in pretty stacks in living rooms rarely if ever to be read, but occasionally browsed through, provided that the images which they contain are sufficiently engaging.

Roja Dove's The Essence of Perfume, published by Black Dog in 2008, is just such a book--provided that one is a perfumista. In fact, the book is ideal as a perfumista's coffee table book because it is filled with fascinating information of little interest to anyone but perfumistas. Ask yourself how many people outside the internet fragrance communities (people, say, in your neighborhood), would be interested in a history of perfume decade by decade?

What about a list of common ingredients in perfume, along with their sources and facts about their particular manner of isolation and use?

How many people do you know who would be interested in finding out the precise distinctions between the various concentrations of perfume: extrait, eau de parfum, eau de toilette, eau de fraîcheur and eau de cologne? Do you know very many non-perfumistas who care about the history of the major perfume-producing design houses, beginning with Chanel?

The Essence of Perfume offers all of this and more in a large format, beautiful coffee table book filled with information of interest to perfumistas--and only perfumistas! The black cloth binding embossed with gold lettering will make the day when the cover falls away in tatters after too much fondling a happy one indeed.